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Politics, down and across

Like many voters in the U.S., Brooklyn-based crossword puzzle maker David Levinson Wilk listened to Donald Trump’s comments about immigration with a sense of shock and anger.

He took to his grid and created a puzzle, “Against the Wall,” with a line of black squares that blocks off the rest of the grid. The solutions included names of famous immigrants like Charlize Theron and Salma Hayek. Puzzle solvers can Tweet or email the puzzle to Gary Palmer, a Republican Congressman who has said that he wishes, like Trump, to construct more fencing to deter illegal immigration.

“It’s a chance for people to visually see what would happen if we listened to them,” Wilk said, “And how we’d be isolating ourselves from a whole host of things like art, literature, science or sports, that come from outside.”

Since 1996, Wilk has made his reputation as a cruciverbalist, authoring grids for the New York Times and puzzle syndicates. But as he continued to read about the 2016 presidential election and related political strife, he decided to blend his puzzles with activism. Crosswords for Congress was born.

Immigration puzzle

Now more than 20 puzzles deep, every week Wilk designs a new one, embedding clues that tie into a political theme. Like the immigration puzzle, other themes allow solvers to send the game and a statement to a political leader, including the catchphrase solved for at the end of the puzzle, a key part of the activism.

“I’m not an EMT going out and saving lives and I’m not a social worker,” Wilk said. “I’m a crossword writer. I want to play to my strengths and use this to affect political and social good.”

With a few notable exceptions, crosswords are generally apolitical. Many were outraged when completing a 1996 New York Times election day puzzle which had the clue “Lead story in tomorrow’s newspaper” but offered up both “Clinton elected” and “Bob Dole elected” as answers that worked as solutions. “People don’t want bias when they have their eggs and coffee in the morning,” Wilk said.

So far, Wilk has created grids that reflect his “left of liberal” take. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio’s universal pre-K initiative was the theme of one, in which many phrases ended with the letter “K,” leaving puzzlers wondering why letters didn’t fit (e.g., grandfather “Clock” is “Cloc”).

One grid questioned Sen. John Cornyn’s proposal to expand legislation concerning “61-across” (Concealed weapon), embedding examples of arms in the clues. Equal representation for vowels was an aside in a puzzle acting as a plea for same-sex marriage to Rep. Tim Huelskamp. (All targets of his puzzles have been Republicans, with one obscure Democrat exception.)

Moment of zen

A puzzle raising concern over the Citizens United Supreme Court decision literally united the names of opposing lawmakers. The last two letters of Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s surname are the beginning of Republican Jim Inhofe’s. A commemoration of Jon Stewart’s tenure on “The Daily Show” featured “Your moment of zen” as the punchline answer and added “Zen” to phrases throughout the puzzle.

When Wilk heard about the killings in a Charleston church, his puzzle incorporated names like Rosa Parks “to show people that racism stubbornly persists today as it did then.”

Wilk says he starts with a broader theme from the news and uses it to work toward clues. Their level, by Times puzzle standards, is “Tuesday to Wednesday-ish in difficulty,” so as not to alienate first-timers.

“Because I honed my skills with crosswords and was pumping out one a week, I knew I could follow a schedule of what was happening in the country in a way that hasn’t been done before.” Wilk defends the puzzles as a new way of reaching people in a cynical world: “There’s an experience that people have solving these crosswords that is meaningful and intimate.”

With the presidential campaign more than a year away, Wilk said he has no shortage of themes to take on. The 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act is on his mind, as is the contentious issue of sexual assault. His aim is to take on topics most traditional crossword publishers shun.

But he still refuses to publish solutions online.

“People struggle to solve these puzzles,” he said.

“In society, there’s a parallel to that. You can’t just solve racism by saying, ‘Here’s the answer. Click.’ That’s why I’m forcing people to come up with the answers.”

Mary Pilon, formerly of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, is the author of “The Monopolists” (Bloomsbury, 2015). She is a regular contributor to POLITICO.